Classical Music as Relics for easy listening

Nah!
Classical still continues!
Order Schnittke from Russia or from Europe to get either the same price or even less including shipping to your door. Also dig-on Kronos Quartet.

Other modern names are: Leo Brower, Hector Villa Lobos(spanish guitar), Daniel Binelli(tango), Astor Piazzolla...

The pre-Schnittke generation from Russia is Skryabin, Prokofiev, Rubinstain and Rachmaninoff.

Great acoustic and electronic pieces composed by Irmin Schmidt especially in Filmmusik collection.

And at last Jethro Tull is realy influenced by classical music! They're classic!

Sounds like "Easy Classical" is just the format of that particular radio station (WGMS right). I don't agree with your assessment of WGMS, however I do agree they play a lot of chamber music and baroque music.

A commercial station needs to worry a lot more about listener levels than a public station in order to sell advertising. That is probably why most commericial Jazz stations play Cool Jazz, and the hard core Jazz is also on public stations.

Personally being a big fan of chamber music I won't complain. Since Schubert wrote a ton of chamber music in his short life, I'd think you would like the station.

For modern, I don't think Philip Glass would work on the radio. People would think the CD is skipping and call the station. You'd also need one of those street gang subwoofer systems in your trunk to play Christopher Rouse!! (LOL)!

WBJC up in Baltimore (91.5) does a better job of playing a well rounded list of classical. It is an independent non-commerical public station (ie, not PBS).

WETA (90.9) the PBS station plays mostly classical around the full slate of non-music NPR programming.

I think it more insidious than just Borders and B&N. At least they have a classical music section, limited as it maybe; I did get my Naxos CDs of Schnittke and Part at Borders. But it started much earlier than that. It really began when Toscannini became a cult god and his worshippers bowed to his whims. He only conducted the warhorses at the NY Philharmonic. He conducted Beethoven's Fifth or Brahms4th over and over. Until the midcult cult "understood" the work. Time-Life for years and years had the great composers series of records.....the same composers and the same works over and over as if there was only 40 or 50 great works. It was not until the late 50s or early 60s that the midcult could "get" Bruckner, let alone Mahler. The FM radio is the same, 3rd rate baroque or the same warhorses. It is like they do not want to offend the audience. Whether thru the airwaves or in the concert halls. When was the lasttime you heard an Ives symphony or a Piston symphony. Even Schoenberg's Guerrelieder. It is not so overtly dissonant that the audience cannot understand. Do they think we are that stupid or are they that stupid that they themselvesdo not understand. Maybe they cannot afford to be adventuresome in selecting music as to offend the patrons and listeners of the great dead composers.

WGMS only plays parts (one movement) of major works, so they can have a lot of commercial breaks. Again a symptom of being a for-profit commercial station.

You will hear a whole work on WBJC in Baltimore. They also broadcast whole live concerts and operas. WETA is kind of in-between. Listen to the Performance Today program some evening on WETA.

To get more recent classical compositions you need to go to live concerts with an orchestra willing to play these pieces. In NJ, we've been fortunate to have new music played at most concerts by the NJSO, and the Colonial Symphony in Morristown has been very good at scheduling contemporary pieces at its concerts as well; I've been inspired to search out recordings of many of these pieces as a result. Otherwise, it's difficult to hear this stuff on the radio except for college or NPR stations.

As far as programming goes, in NY we had WNCN for a while which switched its traditional classical format programming to Classical Lite (no Mahler, large choral works or anything past the classical period, it seemed) after having problems catching listeners with more varied fare; it's now long gone, replaced by a classic rock format. I too despair of formulaic programming like that; back in the 60s I could get R&B, Motown, West Coast rock, English rock, folk rock, everything on the same station in the same hour, now you need to go to the specialty stations for each type of music. We at least have WQXR in NY, and while it's not perfect it does offer a large variety of music compared to what you're describing.

But your complaint, both about the programming of orchestras and radio stations, unfortunately flies in the face of economic reality. Radio stations, save NPR, are commercial ventures driven by advertizing dollars, and these formats we've seen develop and take over are designed to give program directors a better chance to sell advertizing slots. More and more broadcasters are larger entities, afraid to go against the flow of formats that are established. Orchestras are already in deep financial peril (in NJ, the governor, not without good reasons, has initially eliminated all arts funding in the budget), and have to give the people who support them what they want. Wasn't Slatkin sort of shown the door in St. Louis in part at least because of his insistence on programming new pieces in his concerts? The best orchestras mix new pieces in with the warhorses to educate their audiences without alienating them, but I can tell you even that is not without a lot of complaints from the audiences. Unless the younger concertgoers who want to hear contemporary pieces come back and start supporting their local orchestras with their money as well as their presence, it is likely that it will be difficult to get what you're looking for, I fear.

Sugarbrie, love the comment on Philip Glass! There's a knock-knock joke about him, where you keep repeating Knock-Knock, Who's There, Philip Glass over and over again! My friend Mr. McDuffie is a big fan of his work, having recorded the Glass concerto for Telarc, and he's been getting me a little more interested in his work (although I'll take the Adams and Rosza over the Glass anytime)--his feeling is that Glass appeals to people used to the repetitiveness of rock music, and I can see the point.